Resurgent Peters out to rally the regions

The renewed relevance that Peters' huge victory has accorded his party prompted a series of positioning statements from the leaders of National and Labour. Photo / John Stone

After Northland win, NZ First leader has sights on National’s heartland.

The humiliating defeat that Winston Peters inflicted on the National Party in last Saturday's Northland byelection has changed nothing. At the same time, it has changed everything.

It has changed nothing in the short term despite the widespread assumption that the loss of a parliamentary seat will put the minority National Government more in hock to United Future's Peter Dunne and Act's David Seymour.

Peters' triumph has changed everything longer-term. His game of divide-and-rule which has him pitting voters in regions which have suffered economic stagnation against their big city cousins is the most serious challenge he has mounted to National's centre-right hegemony since he climbed aboard the anti-Asian immigration bandwagon some two decades ago.

With other parties now also arguing for curbs on the number of immigrants, Peters has been casting around for an equally potent substitute for some time. He has now found one.

To deal with National's minor party allies first, the notion that they now have more leverage is more myth than reality.

The dynamics which govern the relationship between the dominant ruling party and its support partners is more than just a simple numbers game.

The reality is that the influence Dunne and Seymour have been able to wield over National since last September's general election is akin to that of an ant crawling up an elephant's backside. The impact of a slight change in the balance of power is likewise negligible.

The evidence for saying that is that neither leader has gone to John Key to demand concessions and rewrite their confidence and supply agreements accordingly.

Both men are acutely conscious that their survival as parliamentary entities is contingent on them adhering to an unspoken pact with National-leaning voters that neither politician destabilises the Government.

If they were to do so, those voters would turn on them, tossing them out of Parliament at the first opportunity.

It all makes Dunne's opposition to now-dumped amendments to the Resource Management Act very much a one-off. Neither he nor Seymour can exercise such veto rights very often - and they know it.

On top of that, if a piece of legislation risks being knocked down, then National will not put it up.

It is also hard to envisage a third-term administration - especially one led by Key - bringing contentious legislation before the House anyway.

If parts of National's legislative programme are too soft ideologically or unacceptably interventionist for Dunne or Seymour then odds-on Key will get the necessary numbers from elsewhere.

Enter Peters stage centre on Wednesday with an "olive branch" - his words - offering to do just that by being willing to negotiate with National over amendments to the Resource Management Act to help National get the broad thrust of its intended reform into law.

It was the New Zealand First leader's way of underlining how the byelection has changed everything.

Kerikeri 14-year-olds Hannah Bindon, left, and Issy Joe get a photo with NZ First leader Winston Peters. Photo / Peter de Graaf

The renewed relevance that Peters' huge victory has accorded his party prompted a series of positioning statements from the leaders of National and Labour.

The most significant was Andrew Little's declaration that as Leader of the Opposition, he felt obliged to ensure Opposition parties operated in a cohesive fashion and presented a united front. He acknowledged that did not mean Labour, New Zealand First and the Greens should not seek to maximise their vote. But it did mean those parties should not trip over one another in attempting to defeat the common enemy - National.

Little's call for unity is a complete departure from the pre-election stance adopted by his predecessor, David Cunliffe, who spurned an offer from the Greens to campaign co-operatively. Cunliffe later conceded that had been a mistake, saying that the "progressive forces of politics" would have done better if they had been better co-ordinated.

Cunliffe may have been too hard on himself, however. His rejection of the Greens' offer had much to do with the fact that Peters cannot abide the Greens and believes (correctly) that they are toxic to the kind of voter he is seeking to reach.

Given Labour and the Greens were never going to win enough seats combined to dethrone National, Cunliffe judged it was better to get Peters on board and leave the Greens, who had nowhere else to go, with no choice but to prop up a Labour-New Zealand First administration.

If Little can find a solution to that continuing conundrum, he will be judged a politician of rare skill.

National believes Little's call for Opposition unity is far more self-serving than he is letting on, however. National argues that weighing in behind Peters' candidacy in Northland brought an abrupt end to Little's growing momentum as Labour's leader and that he has consequently handed Peters a huge advantage in the run-up to the 2017 election.

No one seriously believes Little can pin Peters down and keep him under Labour's wing. National thinks Peters is on such a roll that he now believes he can supplant Labour as the second biggest party, at least in provincial and rural New Zealand. Thus did Key taunt Little in Parliament by referring to him as the "Junior Leader of the Opposition".

National has little to be smug about, however.

With his talk of "two tiered economies" and "second-class citizens", Peters is already looking well beyond Northland's boundaries to sell his message of Government neglect to the inhabitants of other regions, such as Gisborne, Hawkes Bay, eastern Bay of Plenty, Wanganui and the West Coast, who - rightly or wrongly - feel they too have been chucked on the economic scrapheap while metropolitan New Zealand prospers.

Key's initial response to the Northland landslide was to position himself as having no truck with Peters.

That only succeeded in prompting Peters to try to force Key to eat his words by offering to come to the party on the Resource Management Act.

Key's dilemma is whether to risk being seen to kowtow to Peters by accepting his offer to negotiate and thus look weak or ignore the offer and look arrogant and seemingly failing to heed the lessons of the byelection defeat.

The prevailing feeling within National is that bitter experience suggests trying to negotiate with Peters is a waste of time because nothing useful comes of it.

That view will be reinforced by the provisos attached to Peters' "olive branch", namely that amending the act does not further stoke the Auckland property market and force up interest rates and the dollar to the detriment of the rest of the country.

What will really be troubling Key, however, is that Peters' repositioning of New Zealand First as some kind of "Country Party" will see him wreaking havoc behind National's well-fortified frontline - territory previously considered to be impregnable.

That is Key's nightmare. Not that he will be allowed to sleep in peace anyway.

The fall of Northland means there will be sleepless nights for nervous National MPs who thought their seats in National's supposed "heartland" were safe forever.

Those MPs will be keeping Key very much awake to that no longer necessarily being the case.